English version

« L’intra peinture de Norg »

Ordinary simplicity, thankfully, is not his forte. Norg likes the unsaid, the inextricable, and the out of the ordinary. The mediums used are manifold, the techniques inventive, and their prodigious assemblage is so uncertain and disconcerting that he appears to be coming from another world, in which cultural norms are alongside the unthinkable.

Territories of fantastical technology surround outlandish, vaguely corporal, dynamic, and vertical emergences. There are hardly any landmarks in the libertarian, gripping, and corrosive world of Norg. The eye ventures eagerly into this journey of uncertainty. Hollowed and fantastical landscapes clear out overflowed evidences.
Strange and evasive totems border on improbable talismans, to such an extent that this incredibly plural and personal art appears laden with an active and intimate magic. However, the keys have disappeared. The graphics are stimulating and playful, as if the pleasure of chaos could give an end to the suffocating order of things.

But Norg’s world organizes itself within this chaos, bearer of life and nonsense. Norg scoffs and will scoff at order and disorder till the end of times. He creates under high doses of mental oxygen, and the intellectual defeat is so exhilarating that it obliges the desalinated eye to be nourished by enigma and surprise.
If brightness is the basic alphabet for this extra-terrestrial being in his intra-painting, the transparency, all he way up to the discomfort, adds to the mystery that is imposed. It does not elucidate, but allows an entrance into a miraculous no-man’s land where human cells would be merged into fine robotized machineries. The form and the formless would become one in order to « create » an ironic world, scabrous and outlandish. Norg opens himself up nicely to the nonsensical, the only thing in the end that can bring real creations to life. Colors, allusive and fragile, have an inexplicable finesse.

« L’intra-vie de Norg »

Originally, an ancestor of mine was a lamplighter. In the 19th century, he light up, or rather, I would dare say, he illuminated the night. He introduced light into darkness in a linear fashion. This man who was my great, great grandfather, executed his social role following a marked path and a trivialized itinerary. During years, he then repeated mechanically the same gesture: carrying around a flame in order to illuminate each coming night.

We can imagine that the ritualized brain of this man might have carved a print into my creative process: awakening the darkness in order to put out the flame and transition into the day.

This reflection of my own mental archeology allows me, today, to clarify my conscience and to better understand instinctively the power that light has over the incomprehensible, or even, the black form, of unreasoned chaos.

With hindsight and maturity, today I can affirm that the mark of this family history nourishes and gives sense to my creation.

Furthermore, mythology and philosophy are also the sources of my creative reflection. The owl, Athena’s bird, symbolizes rational knowledge, intelligence, the gift of clairvoyance, and the reflection that dominates over darkness.

The German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) remarks that “Minerva’s owl only takes off at nightfall. Likewise, the philosophy, animal of the night, the inspiration of accomplished jobs, only reflects upon forms of life when these same forms are dead.”

At least for some times, philosophy ceased to be in the
heat of the moment in order to calmly meditate on all human

beings who have lived and created in the course of their history.
Until the age of 25 years old, I was in the darkness of ignorance and a lost being. Then, the rise of my rational consciousness gave way to the light of meaning, amidst a search for an understanding of the why of the why.
Until adolescence, I had a normal life. Then, everything changed.
I dropped out of school and dove into a dark mass. I started a baking apprenticeship overnight. I was isolated from the school’s collectivity and I endured a paternal violence that only continued to grow. I lost all forms of self-esteem and was full of anger towards others and myself. This experience as a whole developed in me a very strong allergy towards authority. This lasted for years. I failed my exams and turned away from several of my life’s episodes.

I learned other manual occupations, with a screed of emptiness, in an always more intrusive fog. I was a broken man who ignored himself, unstructured and traversed by urges of death and of mortiferous ghosts.

However, these different experiences have transmitted to me a knowledge that was honed by materials and tools.

Some years later, both meeting a French and philosophy professor and undergoing a regular counseling with a psychiatrist proved to be decisive factors in my life, allowing me to straighten myself out, thanks to the culture that I was then devouring. I woke up, coming out of a rational abyss, and I got back in touch with my family.

This entire journey explains why I am this sensitive to the equilibrium of opposites and why all of my artistic thinking is based on the idea of contrasts: cold and warm tones, round and squared forms, shadow and light, mechanical and organic.

Armed with my brushes and my feather at hand, like a warrior’s two swords, I was able to walk towards an illusion of infinity, ignoring the incommensurable immensity that is to be crossed while sorting out the surface, the canvas and the white page. These are my battlegrounds, into which I mix dark experiences that I walk through in order to recover myself.

This way, I was able to conceive the paradigm of my reflection in connection with the idiosyncrasy of my past.

I have reflected and I have conceived of a system founded upon three trilogies which themselves form a geometry: a square inside a circle that crystallizes a matrix, a metaphor of the self and the world (See Norg’s illustration). From this moment on, I have been able to really start creating from this construction, that is a matrix to me. It appeared to me interesting to instill in the history of these three life forces (fundamentals, colors, psyche), the poetics of my sensibility, introducing to them different techniques (oil, acrylic, drawing…) from other devices and from the sensitive balance of power that one can find in nature (darkness-light, mechanical-organic), and work on tones and forms through contrasts.

My first paintings were completely geometric, virgin from any narration. Then, an impressionist piece of writing injured the totality of space, standing in opposition to it like a second skin. I then established a space between the two. From this conjugation, that was initially fixed on glass, and then on plexiglas, I expressed the nature-culture, tonality-form, mobile-immobile relationships.

Later, I introduced the concept of “cloning,” which allowed me to question “identity,” the relationship that the individual has with the world, and to interrogate “liberty.” Coming out of Roschach’s test, my technique, once adjusted, allows it to be combined with my game of light and darkness. This fact echoes my past (hate-love, appearing-being, ignorance-knowledge) and an allegory, Plato’s cave one.
The experience and reflection of my work do not fit into any artistic movement or trend. I made the term «post-synthetism» mine: I explain it as a permanent research of binary relationships and of hidden luminous essences, in order to render visible and transcend: “the extreme fusion of this diamond’s point,” of which René Char spoke. I touch through thought and I translate through the hand all of these sensible and opposing fragments, so that a rascal can then stretch it towards an idea of totality. I try to be a magician, a priest who equates the opposites in order to make them appear reconciled, through the line, color, form, in a supra-personal manner.

Finally, in my pictorial and sculptural universe, what is important is to always be vigilant to the unconscious ignorance of the created object, to feel and create the closest possible to the real while still being attentive to, and studying your own evolution.

“ Out of those who stay, and those who have passed on to the other side of the mirror, there you have an artist, or a man who has been released from his own chains.”